Now that the holiday season has passed, we finally have a full picture of how online retailers performed this Christmas, thanks to data gathered by comScore. The numbers are good — really good. According to the web statistics company, e-commerce sales rose by 5 percent, enough to break $27 billion in online business.

comScore measured online shopping from November 1 to December 24 and broke it down into its most important components, including Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday and the weekend before Christmas. Every time period except for Green Monday did far better than it did in 2008.

As you can see, online retail jumped from $25.8 billion to $27.1 billion during the two-month period. And as we already knew, Black Friday saw a big increase in sales from 2008. It looks like December 14 was the busiest day of the season, garnering $854 million in online commerce.

Online retail's rise can be attributed to a lot of factors: an improving economy, more web-savvy people choosing to do more of their shopping online and rising social media marketing budgets — to name a few.

We're glad to hear this good news about online retail and the improving state of our fragile economy, and we hope the trend continues.

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